The word rhetoric has come in for a lot of
abuse lately. When we see the word these days, it's at best preceded by
"empty," and at worst fingered as a national threat, as in the recent
debate over overheated political rhetoric.

But rhetoric in the original sense — the
classic sense — is something else. It's a toolkit, a set of methods used for
generations to make speech more artful and effective. Rhetoric in this sense
now tends to be dismissed as an anachronism, the kind of thing that goes with
side whiskers or quill pens.

But the truth is, we all use this kind of
rhetoric every day without understanding it. When you say, "Hot enough for
ya?" banal as it might seem, you're employing erotema — a question that
doesn't call for a reply (what we call a 'rhetorical question"). When
you're setting up two friends and say, "He's not unattractive,"
that's litotes, by which you avoid making a claim directly, instead denying the
opposite. Like M. Jourdan in Moliere's play, who finds he has "spoke Prose
above these forty Years, without knowing any thing of the Matter," we use
these devices every day, in the same way and for the same purposes we use a hammer
to drive in a nail or a can opener to open a can: because that's the best way
to get what we want to get done, done.

To those of us who haven't studied rhetoric
— that is, pretty much all of us — its workings are largely invisible. So we
are lucky to have Ward Farnsworth's wonderful new book, Farnsworth's
Classical English Rhetoric, to explain the notion and rescue it from total
disrepute. Farnsworth, a professor of law at Boston University,
fell in love with rhetoric as a student of Latin, and realized that tools for
writing and speaking effectively were of great value to the students he was
training to be lawyers.

Out of the hundreds of figures of speech
known to the ancients, Farnsworth has pulled just 18, the ones that he
considers to be most useful for modern speakers and writers. Their names can be
daunting — epizeuxis, symploce, polysyndeton, aposiopesis — but Farnsworth
sorts them into handy categories and gives examples of their use, not from
Roman authors dead and gone for centuries, but from the great writers of
English from about 1600, the time of the King James Bible, to 1950. (Farnsworth
stops in 1950, he explains, because "the authors and statesmen of those
earlier periods studied rhetoric more closely than it tends to be studied today.")

His practitioners are not only notably
skilled, but also notably entertaining, which makes "Farnsworth's
Classical English Rhetoric" as much an enjoyable read as an educational
manual. Take the example of litotes — affirming something by denying the
opposite — Farnsworth gives from Mark Twain: "She was not quite what you
would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was
the kind of person that keeps a parrot." Then there's this example of
anadiplosis (repetition) from an 1836 speech by Daniel Webster, in the Senate:
"The bill, therefore, was lost. It was lost in the House of
Representatives. It died there, and there its remains are to be found." Or
from Macaulay's "History of England," this example of isocolon
(parallel structure): "The Puritan hated bearbaiting, not because it gave
pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

By pulling the examples out and labeling
their moving parts, Farnsworth shows us how rhetoric really works, as in this
example of metanoia (correcting oneself in midstream) from Arthur Conan Doyle,
designed to startle or surprise the reader: "And now, Doctor, perhaps you
would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to
be." Or as this example of polysyndeton (the repeated use of
conjunctions), which in Farnsworth's explanation can "lend a sense of
motion to a narrative [and] give the action a breathless or headlong
quality": "[T]hen the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and
laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of the
darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's
soul." (From "Moby-Dick.")

And that is perhaps the most compelling
reason to read "Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric" — to
recognize when the techniques of rhetoric are being employed, and why, so that
you can separate them from the ideas they carry, and judge each independently.
In the same way the same scene in a movie can seem either innocuous or sinister
depending how it's presented (search for "recut trailer" on YouTube
if you don't believe me), different figures of speech can color statements in
subtle ways.

Maybe if rhetoric were given another name —
say, something like the design patterns of computer science ("templates
for solving problems that can be used in many different situations") — we
could look through the old-fashioned-sounding term and focus instead on the
very useful tools it provides. But until rhetoric is successfully rebranded and
becomes popular again, you can treasure the access to the rhetorical art
Farnsworth provides in his extremely enlightening book.

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and founder
of Wordnik.com. E-mail her at erin@wordnik.com.